10/29 Reading

Chapter 7 of Howard’s Design to Thrive entitled “Significance” focuses on building gravitas, brand, and recognition. This chapter will focus on what to look for in terms of providing members of a social community with a sense of significance and would make them want to continue with the site and use it long-term.

In order to make your community be viewed as significant, it needs to be: “well recognized, established as the “go-to-place for accomplishing your users’ goals, valued by people your users respect, population by people who are serious and passionate in their field and distinguished as a reputable brand to your users” (168). Creators of communities must keep in mind that outside factors are as much of an importance to success to the community as inside ones.

The idea of exclusivity is attractive for potential members. Howard makes a key point when it points this concept out on page 168: “People are perverse; they want to be a part of a group, but they don’t want to be another face in the crowd.” The challenge for designers comes into play because of this thought process by users. An example of this type of exclusivity can be seen through the start of Facebook. First designed as an extremely exclusive site, the site then became more open to the public by very slowly, and through several steps. When Facebook went completely public, some members cried out but the popularity of the site is still established due to the overwhelming amount of people that populate it.

Some techniques Howard uses: Identify key “influentials,” Regional Service Directors, National Training Staff, Executive Directors among others, because they are guaranteed to have their own extensive networks. By using this information, you can offer premium access for influentials to bring them (and hopefully some of their networks) to use the site. You can also use poster child testimonials, presentations art regional conferences, documentary dvds, magazine stories, and others (184-185).

The following section is titled “Techniques” which includes an in-depth look at these (8) listed:
1) Provide a story that shares a vision
2) List members’ accomplishments
3) Participate in influential communities to create trails back to yours

4) Build your social network or community in a custom space
5) Make connections with other leaders in social
6) Celebrate celebrities
7) Create a contest, game, or video
8) Mobilize your existing members

10/8 Reading

Chapters “Simple” an “Unexpected” from Heath & Heath’s Made to Stick provide useful insight to what makes stories “stick.” I have picked out what I took to be key points from the reading.

First, we must have an understanding of what “simple” truly means. Simple, in terms of Heath & Heath, is finding the core of the idea: “finding the core means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements (28).” The process might seem like an easy thing to do, but the authors point out that sometimes tough decisions have to be made in terms of scratching ideas that are important to the core but are not the most important to the core.

After finding the core, we can see how it fits in with Heath & Heath’s equation on page 45: “Simple = Core + Compact.” “The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be” (47). It seems like this is commonsense. I felt like the quote on 48 summed up this part of the chapter nicely when it alters the Golden Rule to fit this topic specifically, “ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference” (48). Nobody wants to be bogged down with an idea that contains too much mess surrounding it making it unclear as to where the appeal is so I felt like this section was really important to the overall goal of what we were supposed to be getting out of this. Side note, just because ideas are simple, doesn’t mean they cannot create complex messages (55).

The chapter “Unexpected” was common sense but very much needed in to be taken into consideration when considering ideas and people. The chapter starts with the age old flight attendant’s message that 99% of the time falls on deaf ears because of the fact that no one’s interested and everyone’s heard it a million times before. The authors mention a flight attendant in particular that handled the situation by improvising a unique script instead of the standard run through. This change made all the difference.

The key aspects of this chapter “focuses on two essential questions: How do I get people’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it?” (65) These essential questions stem from understanding essential emotions: surprise and interest. Heath & Heath specifically choose these two emotions because “surprise gets our attention” and “interest keeps our attention” (65).

An interesting look at was for the television commercial for the new “Enclave minivan.” The authors use this example to show how something unexpected is a great attention grabber. We are all accustom to car commercials and this commercial starts no differently as it boats specs and perks of this “new” car. When approaching an intersection, however, the van is slammed by a speeding car and we view a horrifying wreck only to have the screen go black and a message that says “Didn’t see that coming” followed by “No one ever does, following finally by “Buckle up.. Always.”

We all have expectations built by our individual schemas. The car commercial turned informative message violated our schema (67). This is so important to keep in mind because advertisers and others play on our schemas constantly as we construct our world by what we see and experience around us.

10/1 Reading

Belonging, one of the criteria of Howard’s RIBS in Design to Thrive, focuses on explaining what it means to belong to a community and what developers can do to foster the feeling of belonging: “This chapter explains that belonging is a sense of one’s “social presence” in a community; it’s a feeling or awareness of the shared bonds a member has with others in the group.” That being said, belonging isn't just about you knowing you’re a part of something, but that it also includes the feeling and others in the community are affected by your presence and acknowledge it whether openly or not.

The ways that Howard outlines that provide the necessary belonging criteria are as follows: shared mythologies, shared stories of origin, shared symbols, and the cultural codes embedded in those symbols.

Ceremonial speeches of belonging include initiation rituals or, the ritual needed in order to gain acceptance into a particular community. Howard demonstrates using Navy Seals and their bonding experience through the challenges of “Hell Week” and way before that, the initiation rituals performed by the boys of Sparta, the fierce section of Ancient Greece. In order to transition from boys to men in the community, they were starved and forced to obtain food by their own accord mostly through theft from those of lower status.

When members become members after any sort of initiation rituals, sometimes communities will have in place rituals dealing with leveling up within ranks. There exist upsides and downsides to the leveling up concept. For example, the Boy Scouts and their levels consisting of Scout, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and finally, Eagle. These levels encourage and motivate boys to reach higher and obtain the ranks of those before them. Downsides to this method include the creation of jealousy among the boys and that they will feel “disenfranchised and leave the community.”

This chapter reminded me of my days as a part of an online private forum in high school as I mentioned in last week's post. A group of my friends created a private forum where we were given a chance to personalize tag lines, pictures, etc with whatever we wanted. The forum would track our total post count and we would receive blocks that were displayed by our tag name on posts. I was determined to gain the little red blocks because to me, that meant I was an important person on this forum. A top contributor and a valuable member of (our little) society. Looking back, it’s hard to realize I spent so much time on that forum, but it fostered a sense of belonging I am reading about today in this class. We knew the rules and how we were supposed to act. The set up was familiar and enjoyable. Maybe it’s not so hard to realize why my time went there afterall.

9/24 Reading

Chapter Four of Design to Thrive is constructed in a way so you understand what remuneration, the title of the chapter, is and why it is important. Howard provides a basic definition of this term: “the commonsense observation that individuals remain members of a social network when there is a clear benefit for doing so.” In other words, what makes someone stick to a social networking site or community? What makes them want to come back, rather than abandon the site completely and never return? It’s a simple concept, with complex undertones. According to Howard, it’s the experience.

Remuneration as a user experience. Howard brings up the user experience because remuneration is very much invested in this topic. When comparing the search engine AltaVista to Google, the two engines are extremely different in terms of page functionality. AltaVista had “an excessive range of entry point options” while Google capitalized on the simplicity of one entry point.

Remuneration does not equal functionality or the business model. I thought this was another important section to highlight. The experience doesn’t take into account the millions of coding behind the site itself therefore Howard’s point: “functionality is not a sufficient condition for remuneration.” The user is usually preoccupied with what they are getting out of the site, rather than what goes in to create the site which is why remuneration is such a separate facet when talking about successful (or unsuccessful) websites: it’s all about the user.

Howard provides a useful checklist of twelve techniques in this chapter which go as follows: 1) make the text editor fun; add emoticons, 2) use a subscription application form, 3) mentors teach, 4) seed the discussion, 5) use stars to show membership contribution levels, 6) rank the value of members’ messages, 7) remove the fear factor by providing examples of how to participate, 8) create a safe environment by sending out “tickle” messages, 9) create a regular event, 10) don’t automatically archive, 11) discourage attempts to send conversation to other blogs, Web sites, or discussion groups, 12) ban redistribution servers and cross-posting

The one I identified with the most with was technique number 5 about membership contribution levels. In high school my friends and I create an online forum where we would discuss certain topics like games and movies. (When I say “my friends and I” I really mean I butted into the group as the only girl because I wanted to be a part of the “guys group” that my friends created!) Anyway, we were ranked on contribution levels and I remember posting on everything, all the time, just being the most annoying person ever to catch up to their levels. (Essentially, a "troll"!)

9/17 Reading

“Technology Changes Rapidly; Humans Don’t” is the titled of Chapter 8 of Howard’s Design to Thrive where he takes a look at how “social networks and online communities have the potential to effect economic, political, and social changes far beyond the expectations of their designers, and that kind of “success” can ironically threaten the sustainability of a community (199).

Howard points us to the social networking site, Twitter, in an attempt to demonstrate the unseen power that its founders did not anticipate: Evan Williams, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, said to his colleagues that he “never anticipated the many, many uses which would evolve from this simple system.” Williams founded the site as a way in which friends could share updates with other friends but as Howard points out, the 2009 Iranian election protests were all over Twittersphere from disgruntled native protesters and Western support. The political sphere was so affected that “the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay shutting down the service for a scheduled maintenance event in order to continue to allow Iranians to continue to share information on the system…”

It is interesting to see the predictions made by Turnoff and Hiltz in the 70s under the Nixon administration where they worked to build EMISARY pertaining to emergency preparedness. As Howard writes, “In hindsight, Hiltz and Turoff’s predictions were mind-bogglingly prophetic.” As the title of the chapter says, technology changes rapidly, so they weren’t thinking about that per say, but more the drive of human need for communication and how evolving technology would facilitate that need.

Howard then talks of past in order that we may better look ahead, particularly pricing. In the past, books were reserved for the “uber-wealthy,” the ones that could pay for them. With the printing press, reduced costs of materials, and others, literacy became wide-spread. With this too, brings the origins of copyrights and other restrictive actions.

A glance in the future brings us four areas of consideration: 1) copyright and intellectual property 2) disciplinary control vs individual creativity 3) visual, technological, and new media literacies and 4) decision-making contexts for future markets.

“Communities and networks of the future will need to market themselves based on their ability to help members make more creative and better-informed decisions rather than the size of their use base.”

The importance and significance of RIBS is not only in past and present, but rooted in the future as we head towards the unknown of technological bounds. He mentions that the it will be the quality of user experience that will replace the quantity of connections as the measure of success. We can already see this statement today. I had a Myspace a long time ago, and so did many others. I never log on anymore because there is nothing I can get off of it that I find useful or worth my time. Networkers need to acknowledge the user in which their community/network is being built around, in order to not only draw them in, but keep them coming.

9/10 Reading

Chapter 6 of Made to Stick is entitled “Stories,” a chapter that’s based on the appeal of stories and how exactly they operate and succeed within our mind. On page 206 Heath and Heath write, “The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act).”

Shop Talk in the Xerox Lunchroom was particularly significant for me as I describe in the next paragraph following this one. The excerpt they provide from the shop talk itself is humorous because it demonstrates a very different atmosphere, a very specific one. The authors were gracious enough to provide explanatory comments in brackets so we, a very general audience, could follow the point of the story and why it was even a story. The misleading E053 error is one that could have been sent out through the company’s email system, notifying workers of this specific error but that would have not have had the same effect as this transfer of information through means of storytelling. Because the tellers had those around them that could follow along easily, they chose to make it interesting and entertaining by including the troublesome error and how they went about finding the problem and eventually fixing it, “in other words, this story is party entertainment and part instruction” (208).

What really struck me about the Shop Talk section is the statement on page 207, “We want to talk to other people about the things that we have in common.” I instantly thought of English majors at Clemson University. One thing I like about this department is that it’s small enough to where you see the same people throughout your four (ish) years here: classmates and professors! (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to debate..!) I’ve talked to so many classmates about professors at Clemson, and they know and can actually visualize the professors and their mannerisms. This makes us a small community in a large university.

There is a mental simulation that initiates in an audience that is hearing the story.  Heath and Heath include a study done by researchers on UCLA students concerning stressful times in their lives asking different groups to envision different time periods pertaining to the stress. Those that looked back and simulated past events to move forward, came out the most positive and the most prepared. Mental simulation works in different ways: helps us manage emotions, helps with problem-solving, and can also build skills. (213).

“The takeway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing” (213).

What I took away from Jared’s story is that the success came from these key aspects: Simple (eat subs and lose weight), Unexpected (a guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food!), Concrete (think of the oversized pants..), Credible (same kind of antiauthority truthfulness that we saw with the Pam Laffin antismoking campaign, Emotional (we care more about an individual than a mass), and it’s a story (our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph). (222-223)

9/3 Reading

In Chapter 3 of Gillin’s Secrets, he divulges his best ways in finding certain topics entangled in the World Wide Web. On page 41 he states, “The first step to social media engagement is social media awareness. That means learning what’s being said about your company, people and products.” It’s easier said than done though. I, for one, wasn’t aware that Google indexes less than 20% of the web (42). I assumed, like probably most of the rest of the population, that Google was the end all be all of website search engines.

Gillin does a great job in communicating how to search effectively on the web. By mainly using one particular topic surrounding Quebec, Canada, he is able to walk us through all the different sites and ways we could go about finding information on this one particular location. He also points out that sometimes it’s not about where you do your searching, but how you are phrasing your search. For example: using italics and searching “best Quebec hotels” gives you a measly 7 results on Google in comparison to the 2.3 million results when you lose the italics.

It is also interesting to the see how some of the most popular social bookmarking sites aren’t even the most functional. It’s all about user opinions though as Gillin points out with the bookmarking site Del.icio.us on page 55.

Chapter 3 of Howard’s Design to Thrive is entitled “Why Invest in Social Networks and Online Communities?” He starts by giving ten reasons as to why you should build these social networks and communities and then going into more detail of each one as the chapter progresses.

On page 30 he discusses the point: enhance and sustain intellectual capital. This section struck me because it was exactly something I had just been a part of, but didn’t think twice about. In that section he talks of a problem he was faced with where he was able to log into his closed, private community of professionals pertaining to usability testing and user experience design in order to obtain valuable solutions from his colleagues in a very short amount of time thus saving him (and his client) time and money.

That situation reminds me of the time where I was in the process of changing phones and wanted to be able to use a certain phone with a certain company. From an open online forum, I was able to pour over mountains of data in order to learn about the differences between unlocking and jailbreaking, as well as the crucial differences between carriers that ran off GSM or CDMA. The data I was able to take in proved useful as it helped me make the best cost efficient decision for my cell phone and what kind of future it would have.

8/27 Reading

Gillin provides a nice overview of some of the basics of social media relations in regards to tools and goals in this week’s reading, Chapter 2 Making Choices from Secrets of Social Media Marketing. What is remarkable about his words is that I’ve never actually stopped to think about social media, rather I’ve grown up in the world where it exists and its popularity has grown tremendously since my birth. Although I am and have been involved with dozens of media sites, I’ve never stopped to think about what these sites say about our culture, and who exactly these sites are targeting.

Gillin provides us with a tip: start with the business goal, not the tools. He explains by saying that the tools are flexible: so much so that picking and choosing between can be a waste of time and energy. A clear goal is useful in producing an outcome that is desirable. With technological change happening so rapidly (and often) it is more important to use something that is already out and advanced enough, rather than attempting to wait for bigger and better things to come as they do not always come out as such.

In Chapter 2, he goes over the importance of designating certain people to be in charge of contributing on websites where consumers are able to post and discuss freely the (overwhelming) negatives in regards to certain companies, whether it be through personal experience or secondhand.  He encourages companies to pick people who are “passionate about their work/product, enjoy sharing with others, risk takers, goal oriented” (30) among other traits to be in the position of handling blogging responsibilities.

Dr. Tharon Howard’s book Design to Thrive chapters one and two are full of information regarding some basics in online communities and related topics. His very first page starts with the headline “Buzz – Why Should You be Interested?” which is so appropriate in today’s world because of the rampant growth in social networking and online communities.

On page 7 Howard gives us RIBS: The Four Elements Necessary for Long-Term Success.  The acronym stands for Remuneration, Influence, Belonging and Significance. Remuneration is, simply, that people need to “believe that they will obtain some positive return on the investment of their time and energy” (7) in terms of virtual communities. Influence: the belief that you, as a member of a community, have an actual voice that is heard. Belonging in terms of members getting to know members more intimately rather than strangers remaining strangers and finally significance which is pretty self-explanatory, that your community is significant in some way or another.

Chapter 2 of Design is entitled The Nature of the Beasts where Howard makes sure firs that we even know what we are talking about in terms of the differences between a social network and an online community. Although I’ve been a part of both, I never considered them different so it was nice to have a clear understanding of what exactly I was even doing on the internet. Social networks put individuals are center of relationships (13) while a community is focused on “the user’s commitment to a core set of interests, values, and communication practices” (15).